Adorkable (25 page)

‘I’m fine, better than fine,’ I told him, and, if possible, he looked even more panicky, like he was having a serious case of regrets and that he’d never meant
any of it
to happen. There was only one way to find out.

‘Look, Michael, can we not do the awkward morning-after thing? We’re both better than that but if you think it was a terrible mistake and actually someone slipped a date rape drug into your lager last night then just say and we’ll pretend that it never happened and we can go back to how we were, or we can go further back than that and just pretend the other one doesn’t exist? OK?’

‘How can you be so … so like
you
this early in the morning?’ he grumbled.

‘What can I say? It’s a gift.’

Michael scratched his head, then cautiously touched the tufts of hair that were in serious disarray. ‘For the record, I don’t regret last night. Well, apart from the bit when you didn’t get your happy but I did.’

I hadn’t expected to feel quite so relieved. ‘Oh, I remember feeling fairly happy.’

Then Michael smiled. It was a slow, sexy smile, and with him sitting in a rumpled bed with rumpled hair and his muscles rippling in a pleasing manner, he looked like a model in an aftershave ad in a men’s style magazine and I finally got what all the fuss was about. It wasn’t the pretty. It wasn’t his join-the-dots cool. It wasn’t his being good at everything. It was because he was ridiculously sizzling hot and I was
so
glad that
I wasn’t the type of girl who simpered or blushed or giggled, because I’d be doing a sickening combination of all of those three things.

‘What time do we have to meet Molly?’ he asked, as he settled back on his pillows and folded his arms.

I checked the time on my phone. ‘In about two hours, just as we’re ready to leave, she’ll call me and say that she’s only just got up and can we put it back by an hour?’

‘Three hours, then? Well, I could get up and make us some coffee or you could get back in bed and we can do something about the happy you didn’t have?’ The slow, sexy smile got leershaped. ‘What do you fancy?’

If I’d worn glasses I’d have pushed them up my nose, but I settled for a prim look. ‘Coffee, please,’ I said, because I knew it would make him stop leering. It did. He pouted instead and I was laughing as I wrenched myself away from my various Mac devices and leapt on to the bed so I could pounce on him.

That set the tone for the rest of the week. We weren’t at it all the time. I had to work on my presentation for the New York conference and write something for the
Guardian
and take a lot of meetings in Shoreditch and Michael’s parents were around and he was boringly fixated on coursework and dull admin work for his mum and dad to get money to buy stuff, but, apart from that, we managed to get together to do IT. Doing it. Seems so weird that you could classify the things we did with each other and how they made us both feel with a mere one-syllable, two-letter word. It.

Anyway we did the amazing, transcendental, life-affirming it every chance we had, which wasn’t as often as we wanted
because it wasn’t as if Michael could stay over. He did vague up the idea of telling his mum and dad about us but before I could list the three hundred and fifty-seven reasons why that would be a bad idea, Michael decided he wouldn’t.

‘She’d be bound to mention it when one of my mates was round mine and we’re still keeping this on a strictly need to know basis, right?’

I nodded. ‘Right, and people who go to our school don’t need to know about us.’

But there was one other person who was going to know about us, whether he liked it or not, and that was my dad. But as my dad was in his sixties and mostly lived a long way away and only used the internet to hook up with women at least twenty years younger than him who had a thing for ageing, alcoholic Lotharios, it didn’t matter.

And even though the week had turned out to be one of the best weeks in recent memory, the threat of my dad’s visit hung heavy in the air, like the scent of wet dog.

Roy, my dad, was due to come round at 4.30 on Friday afternoon. We weren’t meeting Michael until seven at the dreaded Garfunkel’s. Given that it would take half an hour to get there, that was two whole hours spent in the company of a man with whom I had nothing in common apart from a microscopic shred of DNA. Sometimes I wondered if we were genetically related but, as Pat absolutely wasn’t the type of woman to play away from home (during my facts-of-life talk she’d told me that she found gardening far more fulfilling than sex) and Roy and I both had identical crooked middle fingers on our left hands, I had to accept the cruel hand that fate had dealt me.

By
3.45, the flat was gleaming. Well, it was tidyish by my standards but probably not by Roy’s standards – he might have liked his drink but he wasn’t one of those sloppy drunks, which would have made my life a lot easier. He could take half an hour to lay a table. One Easter Sunday, there had even been a ruler involved.

Anyway, I’d filled the fridge with nutritious food, quite a lot of it green and not Haribo-green either. Not that I was going to be eating any of it. I’d also given myself a makeunder. I wasn’t getting rid of my peach-coloured hair, not for no man or paternal signifier, but I’d toned down the technicoloured splendour of my ensemble. Normally I wore what I wanted, but Roy was allegedly my father and he paid the service charges on the flat and the utility bills and put some money into my account for housekeeping, and in return I went to school, did my coursework like a good little girl and when he rolled into town for a visit, I tried to give every appearance that I could live a successful, independent life free from the parental yoke. Part of that was not letting my freak flag fly quite so high, which was why I was wearing a matching jumper and cardigan, a silver lamé twinset that I’d found in a charity shop, a red knee-length circle skirt and shoes that didn’t look like an old lady had worn them first.

Even so, when I opened my front door and Roy saw me, his face dropped. Like he’d had an idea of me in his head that was prettier and smilier and just a lot
less
than I actually am and, as usual, I’d disappointed him before I even opened my mouth.

‘Oh, hey, Roy,’ I said, and his face dropped a bit more. My dad looks like the human equivalent of one of those really jowly
dogs, so he always seems fairly morose, but when I’m with him it gets more pronounced, especially as I refuse to call him Dad. I mean, he’s not really my dad. He kind of stepped back from that role a long time ago and I don’t live with him, I don’t speak to him much, he wouldn’t dare give me a curfew and he doesn’t help me with my homework, so why should I call him Dad?

Anyway, I let Roy gingerly wrap one arm round me in an awkward hug, and kiss my forehead, and then I ushered him into the flat and bringing up the rear was his latest woman. To be fair, it was the same woman he’d turned up with three months ago, so it was obviously serious. I couldn’t remember her name, but then Roy said, ‘You going to give your Auntie Sandra a kiss?’

He always talks to me either in a patronising voice like I’m seven or in a bluff, blustery way like I’m a proper adult and should act like one. I still wasn’t going to give Sandra, who was smiling nervously at me, a kiss. I settled for a half-hearted wave and led them into the lounge.

They both looked round and I knew they weren’t seeing the several metres of floor – not heaped with
neat
stacks of magazines – that I’d actually vacuumed. Sandra was looking at the exact spot on the sideboard where I’d set up the DustCam and when I graciously offered them a cup of tea and went to the kitchen, she ran her finger along the mantelpiece and showed the grimy evidence she’d uncovered to Roy.

It was excruciating but familiar. I gave Roy a tour around the flat so he’d know I hadn’t moved in a family of meth-heads or illegal immigrants. I showed him some coursework, though he and Sandra were very dismissive of my seascape. ‘You should
have painted the beach at Margate,’ Sandra said, pursing her lips. ‘You get a lovely vista there.’ Then I gave him the pile of envelopes from boring places like British Gas and he wanted an explanation of how long I had the central heating on for every day.

When it was 6.30 and I’d told Sandra for the fifth time that I didn’t want to change and, yes, really, this was what I was going to wear for dinner, I hustled them out of the flat. We had to take public transport because Roy would want a drink, more than one drink, so he used the time to grill me about Michael.

‘How old is he? Where did you meet him? What’s he doing his A-levels in? Has he applied to university? What do his parents do for a living? Oh, so they’re not short of a bob or two?’

‘What does this Michael do in his spare time?’ Roy asked as we got out at Leicester Square tube station. In all his years of going to Garfunkel’s, Roy had decided that the one on Irving Street had the cleanest loos, friendliest staff and best-stocked salad bar. There was probably a spreadsheet involved. ‘Does he have the same hobbies as you?’

This was Roy-speak for, ‘Is this boy, who may or may not be trying to impregnate you, the same kind of weirdly dressed weirdo with weird pastimes as you?’

‘He’s just a friend,’ I kept grimly repeating. ‘A friend who, by some strange accident of birth, just so happens to be a boy.’ It occurred to me as we finally reached Garfunkel’s that Roy had asked far more questions about Michael and his likes and dislikes and future career trajectory than he ever asked about mine.

The object of Roy’s curiosity was hovering at the entrance to
the restaurant. His face lit up when he saw us, because it was a freezing cold November night and Michael always turned up for everything at least ten minutes early and we were five minutes late. I wanted my face to light up too because, honestly, I was so pleased to see someone who wasn’t Roy or Sandra. I settled for gently punching him on the arm instead.

‘Michael, this is one of my secondary caregivers, Roy, and this is Sandra, Roy’s special friend,’ I said by way of introduction. ‘Roy, Sandra, this is Michael, who’s not, repeat not, a special friend. Just an ordinary friend.’

I squeezed Michael’s hand as he held the door open for us to show that he wasn’t just an ordinary friend and I was fudging the truth for appearance’s sake and, actually, to save him a world of trouble. He caught my eye and pulled a face but I wasn’t sure if he was annoyed with me or if he already realised that he was in for one of the most tedious evenings of his life, free salad notwithstanding.

There was a lot of fuss before we could sit down as the first table was too near the toilets and Sandra couldn’t sit with her back to the room because it made her feel dizzy but she did need to be able to see out of the window because she got ‘a touch claustrophobic’, but eventually we were all seated. Michael and I had our backs to the restaurant because we didn’t suffer from claustrophobia and Sandra and Roy were sitting opposite, a gin and tonic and a large whisky in front of them.

They both kept staring at Michael and I hoped Roy wasn’t going to say something really tactless like, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to a Chinese restaurant?’ For real. Once
Bethan was seeing a black guy, shock horror, and Roy actually asked him where he was born and wasn’t happy when Martin said, ‘Chalk Farm.’

Thankfully that didn’t happen tonight and Michael wasn’t wearing his low-slung jeans that showed his boxer trunks to the world. He was wearing his dark blue jeans that stayed on his hips with a blue and white check shirt and his grey hoodie. Not the most exciting outfit in the world, but it was parent-and girlfriend-of-parent-friendly and so was Michael.

He politely answered all of Roy’s questions, giving the answers that we’d already run through, but Roy had only just asked Michael what his projected A-level grades were when Sandra tugged on Roy’s sleeve.

‘I think we should go to the salad bar now,’ she said urgently, her head swivelling in that direction. ‘They’ve just restocked.’ It shouldn’t have been possible for two old people to move so fast. One minute they were sitting there, the next they were on the other side of the restaurant. I rested my head on Michael’s shoulder for the briefest of moments.

‘Oh, poor Jeane, has it been awful?’

‘It’s been the absolute awfullest,’ I replied. ‘And I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to eat some salad.’

Michael grinned, though there was nothing to grin about. ‘If you eat all your salad then I’ve got you a special treat for later on.’

‘I thought you had to go home,’ I groused, because even though it was half-term and there were no school nights during half-term, Michael wasn’t staying over. It was stupid. He was eighteen. Legally he was allowed to stay over without his
parents’ consent, or he could simply lie and say he was at a friend’s house, but he was too vanilla. ‘They’ll go up for at least two more salad refills and we’ll be here for
hours
and then there won’t be time for you to give me a special treat.’

I had no idea why Michael was still grinning. ‘I’m not talking about
that
,’ he said prissily, as if I had to beg and plead and cajole in order to be able to have my wicked way with him, which, not even. ‘I came up here early so I could go to Chinatown to get some stuff for my dad and visit my favourite Chinese bakery.’

‘Oh! Did you get the buns with the red sticky paste in them?’

‘I might have done.’

‘You know, if I did proper boyfriends and you were my proper boyfriend then you’d be, like, the god of proper boyfriends,’ I managed to spit out, because props were due. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into this.’